Learnings on the use of ICT for agriculture


Posted on December 15, 2009  /  1 Comments

Mobile phone message services like one deployed by the financial news agency Reuters to over a million farmers in India, could help Sri Lankan farmers earn more for their produce, experts said.

Ranjit Pawar of Reuters Market Light, India said their SMS (short message service) in India provide farmers timely information and helps eliminate middlemen.

“A farmer told me, ‘If I had timely information I could have made 40 percent more money,’ when we launched the short message service in India,” Pawar told a seminar on knowledge based economies.

It was organized by LIRNEasia, a regional think tank based in Colombo, Sri Lanka.

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1 Comment


  1. In Sri Lanka local language SMS or Local language usage in Computers is a distant dream. Sri Lanka has not done the basics. Sinhala and Tamil characters are not recognized in the SLSI. (Sri Lanka Standards Institute) Therefore only few Sinhala characters have proper utf values in the unicode database. We do not have a FEP or a IME correctly developed. These terms are not heard in the sri lanka.

    Our elite in the IT field does not like to educate the masses. They want to have their own way and dictate terms to the public.

    Donald Gaminitillake
    Lets us change the standard